I leave to learned fingers, and wise hands, The artist and his ape, to teach and tell How well his connoisseurship understands The graceful bend, and the voluptuous swell: Let these describe the undescribable: I would not their vile breath should crisp the stream Wherein that image shall for ever dwell; The unruffled mirror of the loveliest dream That ever left the sky on the deep soul to beam. LIV. In Santa Croce's holy precincts lie Ashes which make it holier, dust which is E'en in itself an immortality, Though there were nothing save the past, and this The particle of those sublimities Which have relapsed to chaos:--here repose Angelo's, Alfieri's bones, and his, The starry Galileo, with his woes; Here Machiavelli's earth returned to whence it rose. LV. These are four minds, which, like the elements, Might furnish forth creation:--Italy! Time, which hath wronged thee with ten thousand rents Of thine imperial garment, shall deny, And hath denied, to every other sky, Spirits which soar from ruin:--thy decay Is still impregnate with divinity, Which gilds it with revivifying ray; Such as the great of yore, Canova is to-day. LVI. But where repose the all Etruscan three-- Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they, The Bard of Prose, creative spirit! he Of the Hundred Tales of love--where did they lay Their bones, distinguished from our common clay In death as life? Are they resolved to dust, And have their country's marbles nought to say? Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust? Did they not to her breast their filial earth entrust? LVII. Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar, Like Scipio, buried by the upbraiding shore; Thy factions, in their worse than civil war, Proscribed the bard whose name for evermore Their children's children would in vain adore With the remorse of ages; and the crown Which Petrarch's laureate brow supremely wore, Upon a far and foreign soil had grown, His life, his fame, his grave, though rifled--not thine own. LVIII. Boccaccio to his parent earth bequeathed His dust,--and lies it not her great among, With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed O'er him who formed the Tuscan's siren tongue? That music in itself, whose sounds are song, The poetry of speech? No;--even his tomb Uptorn, must bear the hyaena bigots' wrong, No more amidst the meaner dead find room, Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for WHOM? LIX. And Santa Croce wants their mighty dust; Yet for this want more noted, as of yore The Caesar's pageant, shorn of Brutus' bust, Did but of Rome's best son remind her more: Happier Ravenna! on thy hoary shore, Fortress of falling empire! honoured sleeps The immortal exile;--Arqua, too, her store Of tuneful relics proudly claims and keeps, While Florence vainly begs her banished dead, and weeps. LX.